Song Sergeant

I just bought Song Sargeant and am looking forward to getting it to work for me.. It analyzed my collection just fine but I need to decide how I'm going to have it start doing things.

But- I have two requests:

1. (easy) Please allow the "unkept songs" folder to be a preference. My setup is a mini mounting a storage server for all the songs, so moving files to a folder on my desktop isn't a great option.

2. (maybe not so easy) If I have two albums which have a song in common, I don't want to delete that song - I'd like to preserve the two albums as is. My main use case is that I have entire album duplicates (storage server to laptop, laptop to desktop, desktop to workstation, is it new? I can't remember!).

This definitely looks like the best tool I've seen for this stuff so far and I've been looking for at least the last 5 years. Thanks!

You know, after playing around with SS tonight for a while, I do think it'd be nice to have an album-centric feature set. If I have two identical albums, I'd like to prefer one which is in folder x (or a descendant thereof).

Also - any plans to make the VBR vs CBR logic better? Lame VBR at ~175 is always better then iTunes CBR at 192, for instance.

I can't envision an easy-to-understand, easy-to-configure way to implement the folder-preferring rule. Ideas?

Re: VBR vs. CBR logic, along similar lines Song Sergeant already compares bit rates between AAC and MP3 the same way Apple does: AAC 128 == MP3 160, etc. No problem to build in VBR effective quality level compensation the same way.

However, I've seen a study (which I'd cite but can't find right now) which indicated that at a given overall bit rate, variable bit rate represents only up to a 5% increase in perceived quality over constant bit rate, and that drops significantly at bit rates above 200 kbps. Sooo, barring further scientific input, I think Song Sergeant will not change in this regard.

1. (easy) Please allow the "unkept songs" folder to be a preference. My setup is a mini mounting a storage server for all the songs, so moving files to a folder on my desktop isn't a great option.

I do understand the desire for this. The next release (1.0.4) will support this, but probably not with a proper user interface to control it. At the very least you'll be able to use the defaults command in Terminal:

Cool! The defaults command is fine for me - thanks. Will it show up in a beta?

Regarding VBR vs CBR - understood, it's a tricky issue. Many of my albums were ripped from CDs back in the day of iTunes 1-4 and that encoder just wasn't very good at all. 224 on that sounds like doodoo, and Lame VBR with an average of 160 sounds so much better.

Coming up with an interface would be difficult though, I certainly recognize.

I think the "scientific data" is only in theory - it doesn't take into account at all the differences in encoders, and the history of having lots of crappy encoders (and mp3s made from them).

In any case, a different solution would be to allow whole albums to be grouped. Case: I had two duplicate albums - one album in VBR and one in CBR. I'd prefer to keep one single album together as a group, since I can see the lineage (one was Lame and one was iTunes). If we had an interface to say "this album wins" then it'd take care of this issue, at least from my standpoint. I don't really care about the VBR vs CBR on a single track basis, and would prefer just to leave it up to the sarge.

I have lots of dupes (usually different types of files of same songs) and I'd like to limit SS when it checks for Dupes to say 20, 40, 60 or unlimited; that way I can do a quick scan, Unmark, Mark AAC songs and merge until SS quicks... And start all over again, as it is now it takes a L-O-N-G time to scan so even that is a drag waiting to be completed....
Thanks
CaptD

Unfortunately, there's no way around the fact that for every track, we have to compare it to every other track in your library. You can, however, cancel the scan part of the way through, work with the partial results, then scan again and let it come up with more before cancelling part of the way through again.